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LulzSec claims responsibility for CIA.gov outage

Website goes down briefly

LulzSec, the hacking and prankster collective that has attacked the US Senate, Sony, and the Fox and PBS television networks, has struck again, claiming it was behind an assault that took down the website for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Attempts to access cia.gov on Wednesday afternoon were met with only limited success. LulzSec claimed responsibility for the brief and only partial outage, writing in a Twitter post: "Tango down - cia.gov - for the lulz."

The website contains no classified material, but bringing down the public portal of one of the world's most powerful government agencies would nonetheless be LulzSec's most brazen prank to date. There was no way to independently verify the group's claim of responsibility.

A CIA spokeswoman told the Associated Press that officials are investigating the reports. Such outages are often the result of DDoS, or distributed denial of service, attacks. The assaults generally require little skill to carry out. ®